nineteenth-century literary criticism: margaret homans ... · [in the following chapter from her...

Margaret Homans (essay date 1986)

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Margaret Homans (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: "Bearing Demons: Frankenstein's Circumvention of the Maternal," in Bearing the Word,University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 100-19.

[In the following chapter from her Bearing the Word, Homans uses the tools of feminist psychoanalytic theoryto study Frankenstein as a parallel between writing and mothering. In this view, Shelley becomes a championof maternal nurturing, and the novel an indictment of the male desire to reject or excise the maternal rolealtogether.]

Married to one romantic poet and living near another, Mary Shelley at the time she was writing Frankensteinexperienced with great intensity the self-contradictory demand that daughters embody both the mother whosedeath makes language possible by making it necessary and the figurative substitutes for that mother whoconstitute the prototype of the signifying chain. At the same time, as a mother herself, she experienced withfar greater intensity . . . a proto-Victorian ideology of motherhood, as Mary Poovey has shown.1 Thisexperience leads Shelley both to figure her writing as mothering and to bear or transmit the words of herhusband.2 Thus Shelley not only practices the daughter's obligatory and voluntary identification with theliteral, as do Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte and Emily Bronte, but she also shares with George Eliot andElizabeth Gaskell (and again with Charlotte Bronte) their concern with writing as literalization, as a form ofmothering. It is to Shelley's handling of these contradictory demands, and to her criticism of their effect onwomen's writing, that my reading of Frankenstein will turn.

Frankenstein portrays the situation of women obliged to play the role of the literal in a culture that devaluesit. In this sense, the novel is simultaneously about the death and obviation of the mother and about the son'squest for a substitute object of desire. The novel criticizes the self-contradictory male requirement that thatsubstitute at once embody and not embody (because all embodiment is a reminder of the mother's powerfuland forbidden body) the object of desire. The horror of the demon that Frankenstein creates is that it is theliteralization of its creator's desire for an object, a desire that never really seeks its own fulfillment.

Many readers of Frankenstein have noted both that the demon's creation amounts to an elaboratecircumvention of normal heterosexual procreation—Frankenstein does by himself with great difficulty what aheterosexual couple can do quite easily—and that each actual mother dies very rapidly upon being introducedas a character in the novel.3 Frankenstein's own history is full of the deaths of mothers. His mother wasdiscovered, as a poverty-stricken orphan, by Frankenstein's father. Frankenstein's adoptive sister and laterfiancee, Elizabeth, was likewise discovered as an orphan, in poverty, by Frankenstein's parents.4 Elizabethcatches scarlet fever, and her adoptive mother, nursing her, catches it herself and dies of it. On her deathbed,the mother hopes for the marriage of Elizabeth and Frankenstein and tells Elizabeth, "You must supply myplace to my younger children" (chap. 3). Like Shelley herself, Elizabeth is the death of her mother andbecomes a substitute for her. Justine, a young girl taken in by the Frankenstein family as a beloved servant, issaid to cause the death of her mother; and Justine herself, acting as foster mother to Frankenstein's littlebrother, William, is executed for his murder. There are many mothers in the Frankenstein circle, and all dienotable deaths.

Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism: Margaret Homans (essay date 1986)

Margaret Homans (essay date 1986) 1

The significance of the apparently necessary destruction of the mother first emerges in Frankenstein's accountof his preparations for creating the demon, and it is confirmed soon after the demon comes to life. Of his earlypassion for science, Frankenstein says, "I was . . . deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge" (chap. 2).Shelley confirms the oedipal suggestion here when she writes that it is despite his father's prohibition that theyoung boy devours the archaic books on natural philosophy that first raise his ambitions to discover the secretof life. His mother dies just as Frankenstein is preparing to go to the University of Ingolstadt, and if hispostponed trip there is thus motivated by her death, what he finds at the university becomes a substitute forher: modern scientists, he is told, "penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in herhiding-places" (chap. 3). Frankenstein's double, Walton, the polar explorer who rescues him and records hisstory, likewise searches for what sound like sexual secrets, also in violation of a paternal prohibition. Seekingto "satiate [his] ardent curiosity," Walton hopes to find the "wondrous power which attracts the needle" (letter1). Frankenstein, having become "capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter," feels that to arrive "atonce at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils." And his work to createthe demon adds to this sense of an oedipal violation of Mother Nature: dabbling "among the unhalloweddamps of the grave," he "disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame" (chap.4). This violation is necrophiliac. The mother he rapes is dead; his researches into her secrets, to usurp herpowers, require that she be dead.5

Frankenstein describes his violation of nature in other ways that recall what William Wordsworth's poetryreveals when read in conjunction with Dorothy Wordsworth's journals. Of the period during which he isworking on the demon, Frankenstein writes,

The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was amost beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield amore luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature. . . . Winter,spring, and summer passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or theexpanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight—so deeply was Iengrossed in my occupation, (chap. 4)

Ignoring the bounteous offering nature makes of itself and substituting for it his own construction of life, whatwe, following Thomas Weiskel, might call his own reading of nature, Frankenstein here resembles



Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi examine Karloff, as the monster, while a scientist looks on. From. Son ofFrankenstein, 1939William Wordsworth, reluctantly and ambivalently allowing himself to read nature, to impose on natureapocalyptic patterns of meaning that destroy it. Dorothy Wordsworth herself makes an appearance in the textof Frankenstein, if indirectly, and her presence encodes a shared women's critique of the romantic reading ofnature. Much later in the novel, Frankenstein compares his friend Clerval to the former self WilliamWordsworth depicts in "Tintern Abbey," a self that he has outgrown but that his sister remains. Shelley quotes(with one major alteration) the lines beginning, "The sounding cataract / Haunted him like a passion" andending with the assertion that the colors and forms of natural objects (rock, mountain, etc.) were

a feeling, and a love,That had no need of a remoter charm,By thought supplied, or any interestUnborrow'd from the eye.

6

If Clerval is like Dorothy, then Frankenstein is like William, regrettably destroying nature by imposing hisreading on it.

When, assembled from the corpse of nature, the demon has been brought to life and Frankenstein hasrecognized—oddly only now that it is alive—how hideous it is, Frankenstein falls into an exhausted sleep anddreams the following dream:

I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, theybecame livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I heldthe corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw thegrave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror. (chap.5)



He wakes to see the demon looking at him, hideous, but clearly loving. The dream suggests that to bring thedemon to life is equivalent to killing Elizabeth, and that Elizabeth dead is equivalent to his mother dead.Elizabeth may have been the death of the mother, but now that she has replaced her, she too is vulnerable towhatever destroys mothers.7 And, indeed, the dream is prophetic: the demon will much later kill Elizabeth,just as the demon's creation has required both the death of Frankenstein's own mother and the death andviolation of Mother Nature. To bring a composite corpse to life is to circumvent the normal channels ofprocreation; the demon's "birth" violates the normal relations of family, especially the normal sexual relationof husband and wife. Victor has gone to great lengths to produce a child without Elizabeth's assistance, and inthe dream's language, to circumvent her, to make her unnecessary, is to kill her, and to kill mothers altogether.

Frankenstein's creation, then, depends on and then perpetuates the death of the mother and of motherhood.The demon's final, and greatest, crime is in fact its murder of Elizabeth, which is, however, only the logicalextension of its existence as the reification of Frankenstein's desire to escape the mother. The demon is, toborrow a phrase from Shelley's Alastor, "the spirit of Frankenstein's "solitude." Its greatest complaint toFrankenstein is of its own solitude, its isolation from humanity, and it promises that if Frankenstein will makeit a mate, "one as hideous as myself. . . . I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant"(chap. 17). That is, no longer solitary, the demon will virtually cease to exist, for its existence is synonymouswith its solitude. But, on the grounds that "a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth," Frankensteindestroys the female demon he is in the process of creating, thus destroying yet another potential mother, andthe demon promises, "I shall be with you on your wedding-night" (chap. 20). If the demon is the form takenby Frankenstein's flight from the mother, then it is impossible that the demon should itself find an embodiedsubstitute for the mother, and it will prevent Frankenstein from finding one too.

The demon's promise to be present at the wedding night suggests that there is something monstrous aboutFrankenstein's sexuality. A solipsist's sexuality is monstrous because his desire is for his own envisioningsrather than for somebody else, some other body. The demon appears where Frankenstein's wife should be, andits murder of her suggests not so much revenge as jealousy. The demon's murder of that last remainingpotential mother makes explicit the sequel to the obviation of the mother, the male quest for substitutes for themother, the quest that is never intended to be fulfilled. Elizabeth suggests in a letter to Frankenstein that hisreluctance to marry may stem from his love for someone else, someone met, perhaps, in his travels or duringhis long stay in Ingolstadt. "Do you not love another?" she asks (chap. 22). This is in fact the case, for thedemon, the creation of Frankenstein's imagination, resembles in many ways the romantic object of desire, thebeloved invented to replace, in a less threatening form, the powerful mother who must be killed.8

This imagined being would be an image of the self, because it is for the sake of the ego that the mother isrejected in the first place. Created right after the death of the mother to be, as Victor says, "a being like myself(chap. 4), the demon may be Adam, created in God's image. Indeed, this is what the demon thinks when ittells Frankenstein, "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel" (chap. 10). But it is also possible,as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, that the demon is Eve, created from Adam's imagination.9

When the demon takes shelter in the French cottager's shed, it looks, repeating Milton's Eve's first act uponcoming to life, into the mirror of a "clear pool" and is terrified at its own reflection: "I started back" (chap.12). Here is the relevant passage from Milton, from Eve's narration in book 4 of her memory of the firstmoments of her creation.10 Hearing the "murmuring sound / Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread / Into aliquid Plain," Eve looks

into the clearSmooth Lake, that to me seem'd another Sky.As I bent down to look, just opposite,A Shape within the wat'ry gleam appear'dBending to look on me, I started back,



It started back, but pleas'd I soon return'd . . .

(4.453-63)

But the disembodied voice instructs her, "What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself (468), and tells her tofollow and learn to prefer him "whose image thou art" (471-72). Christine Froula argues that the fiction ofEve's creation by a paternal God out of the flesh of Adam values the maternal and appropriates it for theaggrandisement of masculine creativity.11 Frankenstein revises this paradigm for artistic creation: he does notso much appropriate the maternal as bypass it, to demonstrate the unnecessariness of natural motherhood and,indeed, of women. Froula points out that in this "scene of canonical instruction," Eve is required to turn awayfrom herself to embrace her new identity, not as a self, but as the image of someone else.12 Created to thespecifications of Adam's desire, we later learn—"Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish, exactlyto thy heart's desire" (8. 450-51)—Eve is, like Frankenstein's demon, the product of imaginative desire. Miltonappropriates the maternal by excluding any actual mother from the scene of creation. Eve is the form thatAdam's desire takes once actual motherhood has been eliminated; and in much the same way, the demon is theform taken by Frankenstein's desire once his mother and Elizabeth as mother have been circumvented. Thesenew creations in the image of the self are substitutes for the powerful creating mother and place creation underthe control of the son.

That the demon is, like Eve, the creation of a son's imaginative desire is confirmed by another allusion bothcloser to Shelley and closer in the text to Elizabeth's question, "Do you not love another?" Mary Poovey hasargued that the novel criticizes romantic egotism, specifically, Percy Shelley's violation of the socialconventions that bind humans together in families and societies. As the object of desire of an imaginativeoverreacher very like Percy Shelley himself, the demon substitutes for the fruitful interchange of family lifethe fruitlessness of self love, for what Frankenstein loves is an image of himself. The novel was written whenPercy Shelley had completed, of all his major works besides Queen Mab, only Alastor, the archetypal poem ofthe doomed romantic quest, and it is to this poem that Mary Shelley alludes.13 Just before Frankensteinreceives Elizabeth's letter, just after being acquitted of the murder of his friend Clerval, Frankenstein tells us,"I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of twoeyes that glared upon me" (chap. 21). This is a direct allusion to a passage in Alastor in which the hero, whohas quested in vain after an ideal female image of his own creation, sees

two eyes,Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,And seemed with their serene and azure smilesTo beckon him.

(489-92)

In Alastor, these eyes belong to the phantom maiden, the "fleeting shade" whom the hero pursues to his death,a beloved who is constructed out of the poet's own visionary narcissism. The girl he dreams and pursues has avoice "like the voice of his own soul / Heard in the calm of thought" (153-54), and like him, she is "Herself apoet" (161). In the novel, the starry eyes become glimmering, glaring eyes, alternately the eyes of the deadClerval and the "watery, clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw them in my chamber at Ingolstadt" (chap.21). This conflation of the eyes of the poet's beloved with the eyes of the demon suggests, even more surelythan the allusion to Eve, that the demon is the form, not only of Frankenstein's solipsism, of his need toobviate the mother, but also of the narcissism that constitutes the safety of the ego for whose sake the motheris denied. The monster is still the object of Frankenstein's desire when Elizabeth writes to him, just as itscreation was the object of his initial quest.14 It is this monster, the monster of narcissism, that intervenes onthe wedding night, substituting Frankenstein's desire for his own imagining for the consummation of hismarriage, just as the visionary maiden in Alastor takes the place both of the dead Mother Nature of the poet's



prologue and of the real maiden the hero meets, attracts, and rejects in the course of his quest.

That the demon is a revision of Eve, of emanations, and of the object of romantic desire, is confirmed by itsfemale attributes. Its very bodiliness, its identification with matter, associates it with traditional concepts offemaleness. Further, the impossibility of Frankenstein giving it a female demon, an object of its own desire,aligns the demon with women, who are forbidden to have their own desires. But if the demon is really afeminine object of desire, why is it a he? I would suggest that this constitutes part of Shelley's exposure of themale romantic economy that would substitute for real and therefore powerful female others a being imaginedon the model of the male poet's own self. By making the demon masculine, Shelley suggests that romanticdesire seeks to do away, not only with the mother, but also with all females so as to live finally in a world ofmirrors that reflect a comforting illusion of the male self's independent wholeness. It is worth noting that justas Frankenstein's desire is for a male demon, Walton too yearns, not for a bride, but for "the company of aman who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine" (letter 2).15

It may seem peculiar to describe the demon as the object of Frankenstein's romantic desire, since he spendsmost of the novel suffering from the demon's crimes. Yet in addition to the allusions to Eve and the "fleetingshade" in Alastor that suggest this, it is clear that while Frankenstein is in the process of creating the demon,he loves it and desires it; the knowledge that makes possible its creation is the "consummation" of his "toils."It is only when the demon becomes animated that Frankenstein abruptly discovers his loathing for hiscreation. Even though the demon looks at its creator with what appears to be love, Frankenstein's response toit is unequivocal loathing. Why had he never noticed before the hideousness of its shape and features? Noadequate account is given, nor could be, for as we shall see, this is what most mystifies and horrifies Shelleyabout her own situation. Frankenstein confesses, "I had desired it with an ardour that far exceededmoderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgustfilled my heart" (chap. 5). The romantic quest is always doomed, for it secretly resists its own fulfillment:although the hero of Alastor quests for his dream maiden and dies of not finding her, his encounter with theIndian maid makes it clear that embodiment is itself an obstacle to desire, or more precisely, its termination.Frankenstein's desire for his creation lasts only so long as that creation remains uncreated, the substitution forthe too-powerful mother of a figure issuing from his imagination and therefore under his control.

To return to the terms with which we began in chapter 1, we might say that the predicament of Frankenstein,as of the hero of Alastor, is that of the son in Lacan's revision of the Freudian oedipal crisis. In flight from thebody of the mother forbidden by the father, a maternal body that he sees as dead in his urgency to escape itand to enter a paternal order constituted of its distance from the mother, the son seeks figurations that will atonce make restitution for the mother and confirm her death and absence by substituting for her figures that areunder his control. Fundamentally, the son cannot wish for these figurative substitutes to be embodied, for anybody is too reminiscent of the mother and is no longer under the son's control, as the demon's excessivestrength demonstrates; the value of these figurations is that they remain figurations. In just this way, romanticdesire does not desire to be fulfilled, and yet, because it seems both to itself and to others to want to beembodied, the romantic quester as son is often confronted with a body he seems to want but does not.16 ThusFrankenstein thinks he wants to create the demon, but when he has succeeded, he discovers that what he reallyenjoyed was the process leading up to the creation, the seemingly endless chain of signifiers that constitute histrue, if unrecognized, desire.

Looking at Alastor through Frankenstein's reading of it, then, we see that the novel is the story of ahypothetical case: what if the hero of Alastor actually got what he thinks he wants? What if desire wereembodied, contrary to the poet's deepest wishes? That Shelley writes such a case suggests that this was herown predicament. In real life, Percy Shelley pursued her as the poet and hero of Alastor pursue ghosts and asFrankenstein pursues the secrets of the grave. That he courted the adolescent Mary Godwin at the grave of hermother, whose writing he admired, already suggests that the daughter was for him a figure for the safely deadmother, a younger and less powerfully creative version of her. Yet when he got this substitute, he began to tire



of her, as he makes quite explicit in Epipsychidion, where he is not embarrassed to describe his life in terms ofan interminable quest for an imaginary woman. Mary starts out in that poem as one "who seemed / As like theglorious shape which I had dreamed" (277-78) but soon becomes "that Moon" with "pale and waning lips"(309). The poet does not seem to notice that each time an embodiment of the ideal turns out to beunsatisfactory, it is not because she is the wrong woman, but because the very fact of embodiment inevitablyspoils the vision. Emily, the final term in the poem's sequence of women, remains ideal only because she hasnot yet been possessed, and indeed at the end of the poem, the poet disintegrates and disembodies her, perhapsto save himself from yet one more disappointment. Shelley was for herself never anything but embodied, butfor Percy Shelley it seems to have been a grave disappointment to discover her substantiality, and thereforeher inadequacy for fulfilling his visionary requirements. Frankenstein is the story of what it feels like to bethe undesired embodiment of romantic imaginative desire. The demon, rejected merely for being a body,suffers in something of the way that Shelley must have felt herself to suffer under the conflicting demands ofromantic desire: on the one hand, that she must embody the goal of Percy's quest, and on the other, hisrejection of that embodiment.

Later in the novel, when the demon describes to Frankenstein its discovery and reading of the "journal of thefour months that preceded my creation," the discrepancy between Percy's conflicting demands is brought tothe fore. The demon notes that the journal records "the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances"that resulted in "my accursed origin," and that "the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person isgiven, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible" (chap. 15). This summarysuggests that while Frankenstein was writing the journal during the period leading up to the demon'svivification, he was fully aware of his creature's hideousness. Yet Frankenstein, in his own account of thesame period, specifically says that it was only when "I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, andbreathless horror and disgust filled my heart" (chap. 5). If Frankenstein is right about his feelings here, whyshould his journal be full of "language which painted [his] horrors"? Or, if the account in the journal iscorrect, if Frankenstein was aware from the start of his creature's "odious and loathsome person," why does hetell Walton that the demon appeared hideous to him only upon its awakening? If the text of this journal is, likeAlastor, the record of a romantic quest for an object of desire, then the novel is presenting us with twoconflicting readings of the poem—Frankenstein's or Percy's and the demon's or Shelley's—confirming our sensethat Shelley reading Alastor finds in it the story of Percy's failure to find in her the object of his desire, or thestory of his desire not to find the object of his desire, not to find that she is the object.

A famous anecdote about the Shelleys from a few days after the beginning of the ghost story contest in whichFrankenstein originated lends support to this impression of Shelley's experience. Byron was reciting somelines from Coleridge's Christabel about Geraldine, who is, like the demon, a composite body, half young andbeautiful, half (in the version Byron recited) "hideous, deformed, and pale of hue." Percy, "suddenly shriekingand putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle." Brought to his senses, he told Byron andPolidori that "he was looking at Mrs. Shelley" while Byron was repeating Coleridge's lines, "and suddenlythought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples."17 If disembodied eyes are, in Alastor,what are so alluring to the hero about his beloved, eyes in place of nipples may have been Percy'shallucination of the horror of having those ideal eyes reembodied in the form of his real lover. This is anembodiment that furthermore calls attention to its failure to be sufficiently different from the mother, whosenipples are for the baby so important a feature. An actual woman, who is herself a mother, does not fit theideal of disembodied femininity, and the vision of combining real and ideal is a monster. Mary's sense ofherself viewed as a collection of incongruent body parts—breasts terminating in eyes—might have foundexpression in the demon, whose undesirable corporeality is expressed as its being composed likewise ofill-fitting parts. Paradise Lost, Alastor, and other texts in this tradition compel women readers to wish toembody, as Eve does, imaginary ideals, to be glad of this role in masculine life; and yet at the same time, theywarn women readers that they will suffer for such embodiment.



It requires only a transposing of terms to suggest the relevance of this reading of Frankenstein to the myth oflanguage we traced in chapter 1 in its form as the romantic quest. The demon is about the ambivalent responseof a woman reader to some of our culture's most compelling statements of woman's place in the myth. Thatthe mother must vanish and be replaced by never quite embodied figures for her is equivalent to the vanishingof the referent (along with that time with the mother when the referent had not vanished) to be replaced bylanguage as figuration that never quite touches its objects. Women's role is to be that silent or lost referent, theliteral whose absence makes figuration possible. To be also the figurative substitute for that lost referent is,Shelley shows, impossible, for women are constantly reminded that they are the mother's (loathed, loved)body, and in any case, "being" is incompatible with being a figure. The literal provokes horror in the malepoet, or scientist, even while he demands that women literalize his vision.

That Shelley knew she was writing a criticism, not only of women's self-contradictory role in androcentricontology, but also of the gendered myth of language that is part of that ontology, is suggested by theappearance of a series of images of writing at the very end of the novel. Once again, the demon is the object ofFrankenstein's quest, pursued now in hate rather than in love. Frankenstein is preternaturally motivated in hisquest by an energy of desire that recalls his passion when first creating the demon, and that his present questdepends on the killing of animals recalls his first quest's dependence on dead bodies. Frankenstein believesthat "a spirit of good" follows and directs his steps: "Sometimes, when nature, overcome by hunger, sankunder the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert that restored and inspirited me. . . . I will notdoubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me" (chap. 24). He says this, however,directly after pointing out that the demon sometimes helped him. Fearing "that if I lost all trace of him Ishould despair and die, [he] left some mark to guide me," and Frankenstein also notes that the demon wouldfrequently leave "marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone that guided me and instigated myfury." One of these messages includes the information, "You will find near this place, if you follow not tootardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed." Frankenstein, it would seem, deliberately misinterprets the demon'sguidance and provisions for him as belonging instead to a spirit of good: his interpretation of the demon'smarks and words is so figurative as to be opposite to what they really say. The demon, all body, writesappropriately on the body of nature messages that refer, if to objects at a distance, at least at not a very greatdistance ("you will find near this place . . ."). Frankenstein, however, reads as figuratively as possible, puttingas great a distance as possible between what he actually reads and what he interprets. His reading furthermoreputs a distance between himself and the object of his quest, which he still cannot desire to attain; figurativereading would extend indefinitely the pleasure of the quest itself by forever putting off the moment of capture.Just at the moment when Frankenstein thinks he is about to reach the demon, the demon is transformed from a"mark," as if a mark on a page, into a "form," and Frankenstein seeks to reverse this transformation. One ofFrankenstein's sled dogs has died of exhaustion, delaying him; "suddenly my eye caught a dark speck uponthe dusky plain"; he utters "a wild cry of ecstasy" upon "distinguish[ing] a sledge and the distorted proportionsof a well-known form within" (chap. 24). Frankenstein's response, however, is to take an hour's rest: his realaim, which he does not admit, is to keep the demon at the distance where he remains a "dark speck," a markon the white page of the snow, his signification forever deferred.18

At the same time that Frankenstein is about a woman writer's response to the ambiguous imperative herculture imposes upon her, it is also possible that the novel concerns a woman writer's anxieties about bearingchildren, about generating bodies that, as we have seen with reference to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,would have the power to displace or kill the parent. Ellen Moers first opened up a feminist line of inquiry intothe novel by suggesting that it is a "birth myth," that the horror of the demon is Shelley's horror, not only ather own depressing experience of childbirth, but also at her knowledge of the disastrous consequences ofgiving birth (or of pregnancy itself) for many women in her vicinity.19 The list is by now familiar to Shelley'sreaders. First, Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after she gave birth to Mary; then, during the time of thewriting of the novel, Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister, drowned herself in October 1816 when she learned thatshe was her mother's illegitimate child by Gilbert Imlay; Harriet Shelley was pregnant by another man whenshe drowned herself in the Serpentine in December 1816; and Claire Clairmont, the daughter of the second



Mrs. Godwin, was, scandalously, pregnant by Byron, much to the embarrassment of the Shelleys, with whomshe lived.20 Illegitimate pregnancy, that is, a pregnancy over which the woman has particularly little control,brings either death to the mother in childbirth (Wollstonecraft) or shame, making visible what ought to haveremained out of sight, the scene of conception (Claire), a shame that can itself result in the death of bothmother (Harriet Shelley) and child (Fanny).

At the time of the conception of the novel, Mary Godwin had herself borne two illegitimate children: the first,an unnamed girl, died four days later, in March 1815; the second was five months old. In December 1816,when Harriet Shelley died and Shelley had finished chapter 4 of the novel, she was pregnant again. With but asingle parent, the demon in her novel is the world's most monstrously illegitimate child, and this illegitimatechild causes the death of that parent as well as of the principle of motherhood, as we have seen. Read inconnection with the history of disastrous illegitimacies, the novel's logic would seem to be this: to give birthto an illegitimate child is monstrous, for it is the inexorable life of these babies, especially those of MaryWollstonecraft and of Harriet Shelley, that destroys the life of the mother. Subsequently, as Marc Rubensteinargues, the guilty daughter pays for the destruction of her own mother in a fantasy of being destroyed by herown child.21

In Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, we saw that the image of childbirth is associated with theuncontrollability of real things. Once a conception has taken objective form, it has the power to destroy itsown source, to transform the mother herself into the literal. In the Brontës' novels, childbirth is structurallyequivalent to (and indeed also often situated in) the coming true of dreams, which has, like childbirth, anironic relation to the original conception. Shelley's 1831 introduction to her novel makes a comparableequation of giving birth, the realization of a dream, and writing. As many readers have pointed out, thisintroduction to her revised version of the novel identifies the novel itself with the demon, and both with achild.22 She tells of being asked every morning if she had thought of a story, as if a story, like a baby, werenecessarily to be conceived in the privacy of the night. And at the close of the introduction she writes, "I bidmy hideous progeny go forth and prosper," and she refers to the novel in the next sentence as "the offspring ofhappy days." The genesis of the novel, furthermore, is in a dream that she transcribes, a dream moreover thatis about the coming true of a dream. One night, she says, after listening to conversation about the reanimationof corpses, "Night waned upon this talk. . . . When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could Ibe said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me." Then follows her account of thefamous dream of "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," the"hideous phantasm of a man" stirring "with an uneasy, half-vital motion," and the "artist" sleeping and wakingto behold "the horrid thing . . . looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes." Waking in horrorfrom her dream, she at first tries "to think of something else," but then realizes that she has the answer to herneed for a ghost story: "'What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which hadhaunted my midnight pillow.' .. . I began that day with the words, 'It was on a dreary night of November,'making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream." Making a transcript of a dream—that is,turning an idea into the "machinery of a story"—a dream that is about the transformation of a "phantasm" intoa real body, is equivalent here to conceiving a child. She makes it very clear that her dream takes the place ofa sexual act ("Night waned. . . . When I placed my head on my pillow . . . I saw the pale student."), just as thebook idea she can announce the next day substitutes for a baby. The terrifying power of the possibility that herdream might be true encodes the terrifying power of conception and childbirth. In Deutsch's language, "shewho has created this new life must obey its power; its rule is expected, yet invisible, implacable."23

Despite Ellen Moers's delineation of the resemblance of the demon to the apprehensions a mother might haveabout a baby, it is the introduction that supplies the most explicit evidence for identifying demon and bookwith a child. Mary Poovey has demonstrated that this introduction has a significantly different ideological castfrom the original version of the novel (or even from the revised novel). Written in 1831, fourteen years afterthe novel itself and following the death of Percy Shelley (as well as the deaths of both the children who werealive or expected in 1816-17), the introduction takes pains to distance itself from the novel, and it aims to



bring the writing of the novel further within the fold of the conventional domestic life Shelley retrospectivelysubstitutes for the radically disruptive life she in fact led.24 Referring obliquely to her elopement with Percyand its effect on her adolescent habit of inventing stories, for example, she writes, "After this my life becamebusier, and reality stood in place of fiction." Echoed later by Robert Southey's remark to Charlotte Brontë, that"literature cannot be the business of a woman's life," Shelley's busyness refers largely to her responsibilities asa mother and wife. When she describes her endeavor to write a ghost story she repeats this term for familyresponsibility: "I busied myself to think of a story." This echo suggests that her busyness with story writing issomehow congruent with, not in conflict with, her "busier" life as a wife and mother. It makes the novel, "sovery hideous an idea," seem somehow part of the busy life of a matron. It is this effort, to domesticate herhideous idea, that may be at the bottom of her characterizing it as a "hideous progeny." If the novel read inthis light seems, like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, to be full of a horror of childbirth, that may only bethe result of the impossibility of changing the basic story of the 1817 novel, the result of assemblingmismatched parts.

Thus the novel may be about the horror associated with motherhood, yet this reading seems unduly influencedby the superimpositions of the introduction, and furthermore it ignores the novel's most prominent feature,that the demon is not a child born of woman but the creation of a man.25 Most succinctly put, the novel isabout the collision between androcentric and gynocentric theories of creation, a collision that results in thedenigration of maternal childbearing through its circumvention by male creation. The novel presents MaryShelley's response to the expectation, manifested in such poems as Alastor or Paradise Lost, that womenembody and yet not embody male fantasies. At the same time, it expresses a woman's knowledge of theirrefutable independence of the body, both her own and those of the children that she produces, fromprojective male fantasy. While a masculine being—God, Adam, Percy Shelley, Frankenstein—may imagine thathis creation of an imaginary being may remain under the control of his desires, Mary Shelley knowsotherwise, both through her experience as mistress and wife of Percy and through her experience of childbirth.Shelley's particular history shows irrefutably that children, even pregnancies, do not remain under the controlof those who conceive them.

Keats writes that "the Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth."26 InParadise Lost, narrating his recollection of Eve's creation, Adam describes how he fell into a specialsleep—"Mine eyes he clos'd, but op'n left the Cell / Of Fancy my internal sight" (8. 460-61)—then watched,"though sleeping," as God formed a creature,

Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd nowMean, or in her summ'd up.

(8. 471-73)

This is "Adam's dream." But what of "he awoke and found it truth"? Adam wakes, "To find her, or for ever todeplore / Her loss" (479-80), and then, "behold[s] her, not far off, / Such as I saw her in my dream" (481-81),yet what Keats represses is that the matching of reality to dream is not so neat as these lines suggest.27 Evecomes to Adam, not of her own accord, but "Led by her Heav'nly Maker" (485), and as soon as he catchessight of her, Adam sees Eve turn away from him, an action he ascribes to modesty (and thus endeavors toassimilate to his dream of her) but that Eve, in book 4, has already said stemmed from her preference for herimage in the water. Though designed by God for Adam "exactly to thy heart's desire" (8. 451), Eve oncecreated has a mind and will of her own, and this independence is so horrifying to the male imagination that theFall is ascribed to it.

It is neither the visionary male imagination alone that Mary Shelley protests, then, nor childbirth itself, but thecircumvention of the maternal creation of new beings by the narcissistic creations of male desire. While Keats



can gloss over the discrepancy between Adam's dream and its fulfillment, Shelley cannot. As Frankenstein ison the verge of completing the female demon, it is for her resemblance to Eve that he destroys her. Just asAdam says of Eve, "seeing me, she turn'd" (8. 507), Frankenstein fears the female demon's turning from thedemon toward a more attractive image: "She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty ofman" (chap. 20). Also like Eve, who disobeys a prohibition agreed upon between Adam and God before hercreation, she "might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation," the demon's promise to leaveEurope. Frankenstein typifies the way in which the biological creation of necessarily imperfect yetindependent beings has always been made to seem, within an androcentric economy, monstrous and alarming.Although Mary Wollstonecraft would in any case have died of puerperal fever after Mary's birth, her earlierpregnancy with Fanny and the pregnancies of Harriet Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Mary Godwin wouldhave done no harm had they not been labeled "illegitimate" by a society that places a premium on theownership by a man of his wife's body and children. The novel criticizes, not childbirth itself, but the malehorror of independent embodiment. This permits us to speculate that the horror of childbirth in Jane Eyre andWuthering Heights stems from the Brontës' identification with an androcentric perspective. To a certainextent, as a writer in a culture that defines writing as a male activity and as opposite to motherhood, Shelleytoo must share the masculine perspective, with its horror of embodiment and its perennial reenacting ofAdam's affront at Eve's turning away. For whatever reason, however, perhaps because of her direct experienceof the mother's position, Shelley is able to discern the androcentrism in her culture's view of the relation ofchildbearing to writing, and thus she enables us to interpret her own painful exposure of it.

At the site of the collision between motherhood and romantic projection another form of literalization appearsas well. While it is important how Shelley reads texts such as Alastor and Paradise Lost, it is also important toconsider, perhaps more simply, that her novel reads them. Like the Brontës' novels, whose gothicembodiments of subjective states, realizations of dreams, and literalized figures all literalize romanticprojection, Shelley's novel literalizes romantic imagination, but with a different effect and to a different end.Shelley criticizes these texts by enacting them, and because enactment or embodiment is both the desire andthe fear of such texts, the mode of her criticism matters. Just as the heroes of these poems seem to seek, but donot seek, embodiments of their visionary desires, these poetic texts seem to seek embodiment in "themachinery of a story." For in the ideology of postromantic culture, it is part of a woman's duty to transcribeand give form to men's words, just as it is her duty to give form to their desire, or birth to their seed, no matterhow ambivalently men may view the results of such projects. In the same passage in the introduction to thenovel in which Shelley makes the analogy between the book and a child, between the conception of a storyand the conception of a baby, and between these things and the coming true of a dream, she also identifies allthese projects with the transcription of important men's words. Drawing on the ideology of maternity as theprocess of passing on a male idea, Shelley describes her book-child as the literalization of two poets' words:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was adevout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines werediscussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was anyprobability of its ever being discovered and communicated. . . . Perhaps a corpse would bereanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of acreature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

Directly following this passage appears her account of going to bed and vividly dreaming of the "student ofunhallowed arts" and the "hideous phantasm," the dream of which she says she made "only a transcript" intransferring it into the central scene of her novel, the dream that equates the conception of a book with theconception of a child.

Commentators on the novel have in the past taken Shelley at her word here, believing, if not in her story oftranscribing a dream, then certainly in her fiction of transcribing men's words.28 Mario Praz, for example,writes, "All Mrs. Shelley did was to provide a passive reflection of some of the wild fantasies which, as it



were, hung in the air about her."29 Harold Bloom suggests that "what makes Frankenstein an important book"despite its "clumsiness" is "that it contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythologyof the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred,among other works."30 It is part of the subtlety of her strategy to disguise her criticism of such works as apassive transcription, to appear to be a docile wife and "devout listener" to the conversations of importantmen. Indeed, central to her critical method is the practice of acting out docilely what these men tell her theywant from her, to show them the consequences of their desires. She removes herself beyond reproach for"putting [her]self forward," by formulating her critique as a devout transcription, a "passive reflection," a"version" that "resembles." She inserts this authorial role into her novel in the form of a fictive M. S.,Walton's sister, Margaret Saville, to whom his letters containing Frankenstein's story are sent and who silentlyrecords and transmits them to the reader.

Now that we have assembled the parts of Shelley's introductory account of the novel's genesis, we can see thatshe equates childbearing with the bearing of men's words. Writing a transcript of a dream that was in turnmerely the transcript of a conversation is also giving birth to a hideous progeny conceived in the night. Theconversation between Byron and Shelley probably represents Shelley's and Byron's poetry, the words, forexample, of Alastor that she literalizes in her novel. That the notion of motherhood as the passive transcriptionof men's words is at work here is underscored by the allusion this idea makes to the Christ story. "Perhaps acorpse would be reanimated" refers initially, not to science's power, but to that occasion, a myth but surelystill a powerful one even in this den of atheists, when a corpse was reanimated, which is in turn an allusion tothe virgin birth. Like the creations of Adam and Eve, which excluded the maternal, Christ's birth bypassed thenormal channels of procreation. It is this figure, whose birth is also the literalization of a masculine God'sWord, who serves as the distant prototype for the reanimation of corpses. And within the fiction, the demontoo is the literalization of a word, an idea, Frankenstein's theory given physical form. As Joyce Carol Oatesremarks, the demon "is a monster-son born of Man exclusively, a parody of the Word or Idea made Flesh."31

The book-baby literalizes Shelley's and Byron's words, the words of their conversation as figures for Shelley'swords in Alastor, just as the demonbaby literalizes Frankenstein's inseminating words. Christ literalizes God'sWord through the medium of a woman, Mary, who passively transmits Word into flesh without being touchedby it. Literalizations again take place through the medium of a more recent Mary, who passively transcribes(or who seems to), who adds nothing but "the platitude of prose" and "the machinery of a story" to the wordsof her more illustrious male companions who for their own writing prefer "the music of the most melodiousverse." And yet, as we will see again with Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, it is precisely the adding of this"machinery," which would seem only to facilitate the transmission of the ideas and figures of poetry into themore approachable form of a story, that subverts and reverses what it appears so passively to serve.

The demon literalizes the male romantic poet's desire for a figurative object of desire, but it also literalizes theliteralization of male literature. While telling Frankenstein the story of its wanderings and of its education bythe unknowing cottagers, the demon reports having discovered in the woods "a leathern portmanteaucontaining . . . some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel" (chap. 15). Thediscovery of these books—Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werther—is followed in thenarrative, but preceded in represented time, by the demon's discovery of another book, Frankenstein's "journalof the four months that preceded [the demon's] creation."32 Both Frankenstein, the book as baby, and thedemon as baby literalize these books, especially Paradise Lost—the demon is Satan, Adam, and Eve, whileFrankenstein himself is Adam, Satan, and God—as well as a number of other prior texts, among them, as wehave seen, Alastor, but also the book of Genesis, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Aeschylus'sPrometheus Bound, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," William Godwin's Caleb Williams, and many others. Atthe same time and in the same way, the demon is the realization of Frankenstein's words in the journal of hiswork on the demon, a journal that is in some ways equivalent to (or a literalization of) Alastor, since bothrecord a romantic quest for what was "desired . . . with an ardor that far exceeded moderation." The demon,wandering about the woods of Germany carrying these books, the book of his own physical origin and thetexts that contribute to his literary origin, embodies the very notion of literalization with which everything



about him seems to be identified. To carry a book is exactly what Mary Shelley does in bearing the words ofthe male authors, in giving birth to a hideous progeny that is at once book and demon. Carrying the books ofhis own origin, the demon emblematizes the literalization of literature that Shelley, through him, practices.

I pointed out earlier that Mary Shelley, unlike the Brontës, would not see childbirth itself as inherentlythreatening apart from the interference in it by a masculine economy. Likewise, writing or inventing stories isnot inherently monstrous—witness her retrospective account in the introduction of how, before her life became"busier," she used to "commune with the creatures of my fancy" and compose unwritten stories out of doors:"It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodlessmountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered." Likeboth Cathys in Wuthering Heights in their childhood, indeed, probably like the young Brontës themselves,Mary Shelley's imagination prior to the fall into the Law of the Father—in her case, elopement, pregnancy, andmarriage—is at one with nature and also does not require to be written down. The metaphor of composition aschildbirth—"my true compositions . . . were born and fostered"—appears here as something not only harmlessbut celebratory. It is only when both childbirth and a woman's invention of stories are subordinated to the Lawof the Father that they become monstrous; it is only when such overpowering and masculinist texts asGenesis, Paradise Lost, and Alastor appropriate this Mary's body, her female power of embodiment, asvehicle for the transmission of their words, that monsters are born. When God appropriates maternalprocreation in Genesis or Paradise Lost, a beautiful object is created; but through the reflex of Mary Shelley'scritique, male circumvention of the maternal creates a monster. Her monster constitutes a criticism of suchappropriation and circumvention, yet it is a criticism written in her own blood, carved in the very body of herown victimization, just as the demon carves words about death in the trees and rocks of the Arctic. She ispowerless to stop her own appropriation and can only demonstrate the pain that appropriation causes in thewoman reader and writer. As we turn now to Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, which takes up like Frankensteinthe question of a woman writer's—and her heroine's—literalization of powerful masculine texts, we will see thatEliot shares much of Shelley's sense of the necessity and the high cost of a woman's literalization, as well asof its power as a criticism of that which appropriates.

Notes

1Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),114-42. Hereafter I will refer to Mary Shelley as Shelley (except where her unmarried name is necessary forclarity) and to her husband as Percy.

2Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's reading of the novel focuses on its "apparently docile submission to malemyths" and identifies it specifically as "a fictionalized rendition of the meaning of Paradise Lost to women"(The Madwoman, pp. 219, 221). Although my interest in Shelley as a reader of prior, masculine texts, as wellas some of my specific points about the novel's reading of Milton, overlaps with theirs, I am putting theseconcerns to uses different from theirs.

3For example, Robert Kiely writes that Frankenstein "seeks to combine the role of both parents in one, toeliminate the need for the woman in the creative act, to make sex unnecessary" (The Romantic Novel inEngland [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972], p. 164). Marc Rubenstein remarks on "the series ofmotherless family romances which form the substance of Frankenstein's past" ("'My Accursed Origin': TheSearch for the Mother in Frankenstein," Studies in Romanticism 15 [1976], 177). The general argument of hispsychoanalytic reading of the novel is that the novel represents Shelley's quest for her own dead mother. U. C.Knoepflmacher, in the course of arguing that the novel portrays a daughter's rage at her parents, mentions "thenovel's attack on a male's usurpation of the role of mother" ("Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," inThe Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C.Knoepflmacher [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], p. 105). Mary Jacobus writes that "theexclusion of woman from creation symbolically 'kills' the mother" ("Is There a Woman in This Text?" p. 131).


Notes 13

Barbara Johnson suggests that the novel focuses on "eliminations of the mother" as well as on "the fear ofsomehow effecting the death of one's own parents" ("My Monster/My Self," Diacritics 12 (1982): 9).Christine Froula's argument about the maternal in Milton, although it focuses on the author's appropriation ofthe maternal for masculine creativity (as differentiated from its circumvention or elimination) helped tostimulate my thinking. See Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton," pp. 321-47.

4 I am following, in this reading, the 1831 revised text of the novel; in the 1818 version, Elizabeth isFrankenstein's cousin. All quotations from the novel will be from the Signet edition (Mary Shelley,Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus [New York: NAL, 1965]), which prints the text of 1831. Futurereferences will be cited in the text by chapter number or by letter number for the letters that precede thechapter sequence. See also James Reiger's edition of the 1818 version, with revisions of 1823 and 1831(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

5Rubenstein notes the sexual nature of Walton's quest, as well as the maternal associations of those aspects ofnature on which Frankenstein carries out his research ("My Accursed Origin," pp. 174-75, 177). Kiely notesthe necrophilia of the passage from Alastor's invocation to Mother Nature (discussed here in chapter 1), andsuggests its similarity to Frankenstein's "penetrating the recesses of nature" (The Romantic Novel, pp. 162-63).

6Quoted p. 149; Frankenstein quotes lines 76-83 of the poem, altering the original "haunted me like a passion"to fit a third person.

7In the context of arguing that the novel critiques the bourgeois family, Kate Ellis shows that Frankenstein'smother passes on to Elizabeth her "view of the female role as one of constant, self-sacrificing devotion toothers," and she suggests that "Elizabeth's early death, like her adopted mother's, was a logical outgrowth ofthe female ideal she sought to embody" ("Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family,"in The Endurance of Frankenstein, p. 131). My argument would explain why what created this "female ideal"also determined the interchangeability of mother and daughter.

8Harold Bloom suggests the resemblance between the demon and Blake's emanations or Shelley's epipsyche,in his afterword to the Signet edition of the novel, p. 215. The essay is reprinted in Ringers in the Tower(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 119-29. Peter Brooks makes a similar point when he writes,"fulfillment with Elizabeth would mark Frankenstein's achievement of a full signified in his life, accession toplenitude of being—which would leave no place in creation for his daemonic projection, the Monster"("Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein," New Literary History 9[1978]: 599). Ellis also suggests, though for different reasons, that the demon is a representative for Elizabeth("Monsters in the Garden," p. 136). Jacobus writes that Frankenstein "exchanges] a woman for a monster,"and she discusses Frankenstein's preference for imagined over actual beings ("Is There a Woman in ThisText?" p. 131).

9Gilbert and Gubar suggest first that "the part of Eve is all the parts" and then discuss at length the demon'sresemblance to Eve (The Madwoman, pp. 230, 235-44. However, in describing this resemblance, they focusprimarily on the patriarchal rejection of women's bodies as deformed and monstrous, as well as on Eve'smotherlessness, but not, as I do here, on Eve as Adam's imaginative projection. Joyce Carol Oates alsosuggests the demon's resemblance to Eve, also using the scene I am about to discuss, in "Frankenstein's FallenAngel," Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 547.

10Quotations from Paradise Lost are from Complete Poems and Major Prose of John Milton, ed. MerrittHughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), and are cited in the text by book and line numbers. Other criticshave noted Shelley's allusion to this Miltonic scene; see, for example, Brooks, "Godlike Science," p. 595.


Notes 14

11Froula writes, "Through the dream of the rib Adam both enacts a parody of birth and gains possession of thewomb by claiming credit for woman herself." Milton, she goes on to argue, reenacts Adam's solution to his"womb envy" by analogously repressing female power in his account of the origin of his poem: "The maleLogos called upon to articulate the cosmos against an abyss of female silence overcomes the anxietiesgenerated by the tension between visible maternity and invisible paternity by appropriating female power toitself in a parody of parthenogenesis" ("When Eve Reads Milton," pp. 332, 338; and see passim pp. 326-40).

12 Ibid., pp. 326-28.

13All quotations from Shelley's verse are from the Reiman and Powers edition of his works.

14Gilbert and Gubar also discuss narcissistic love in the novel, although with reference only to the potentiallyincestuous relation between Frankenstein and Elizabeth, not with reference to the demon (The Madwoman, p.229). My reading would suggest that Frankenstein's relation to Elizabeth is far less narcissistic than hisrelation to the demon; in his descriptions of Elizabeth, he focuses on her difference from him, which is what Ibelieve makes her like the mother and therefore threatening.

15Jaya Mehta pointed out to me the significance of this aspect of Walton, in a seminar paper at Yale in 1984.

16Kiely discusses "the sheer concreteness" of the demon, though his concern is with the mismatching betweenideal and real in the novel (The Romantic Novel, p. 161).

17 The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London: Elkin Matthews, 1911), pp. 128-29,entry for 18 June 1816. Cited also by Rubenstein, who reads it as a story about "maternal reproach" andconnects it with Frankenstein's dream of his dead mother ("My Accursed Origin," pp. 184-85). I am gratefulto Marina Leslie for her discussion of this episode in a seminar paper at Yale in 1984.

18Peter Brooks's essay on Frankenstein also connects the plot of desire with the plot of language in the novel,but to a somewhat different effect. Brooks argues that the demon's acquisition of the "godlike science" oflanguage places him within the symbolic order. Trapped at first, like any baby, within the specular order ofthe imaginary, the demon is first judged only by its looks; it is only when it masters the art of rhetoric that themonster gains sympathy. But, Brooks continues, despite the promise that the symbolic seems to hold, themonster's failure to find an object of love removes its life from the signifying "chain" of humaninterconnectedness and makes of it instead a "miserable series," in which one signifier refers always toanother with "no point of arrest." Thus Brooks sees the monster as a dark and exaggerated version of all lifewithin the symbolic, where desire is never satisfied and where there is no transcendental signified. Although Iagree with much of what Brooks writes, I would argue that in its materiality and its failure to acquire an objectof desire, the demon enters the symbolic primarily as the (dreaded) referent, not as signifier. The negativepicture of the demon's materiality is a product of its female place in the symbolic, and not of any lingering inthe realm of the imaginary (which Brooks, with other readers of Lacan, views as tragic). I would also arguethat the novel presents, not a vision of the condition of human signification, but a targeted criticism of those inwhose interests the symbolic order constitutes itself in the ways that it does.

19 Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 140.

20 Ibid., pp. 145-47.

21 This is the general tendency of Rubenstein' s argument, carrying the material Moers presents into apsychoanalytic frame.

22See Rubenstein, "My Accursed Origin," pp. 168, 178-81; Poovey, The Proper Lady, pp. 138-42.


Notes 15

23 Deutsch, Motherhood, p. 215.

24 One of the central tenets of Poovey' s argument concerns Shelley's endeavor in her 1831 revisions to makethe novel more conservative, more in keeping with a proto-Victorian ideology of the family (see The ProperLady, pp. 133-42). Poovey argues, however, that both versions of the novel oppose romantic egotism's assaulton the family.

25Gilbert and Gubar assert as part of their argument that everyone in the novel is Eve that "Frankenstein has ababy" and that as a consequence he becomes female (The Madwoman, p. 232). I would argue, to the contrary,that Frankenstein's production of a new life is pointedly masculine, that it matters to the book that he is a mancircumventing childbirth, not a woman giving birth.

26Letter of 22 November 1817 to Benjamin Bailey, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (London:Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 37.

27 I am indebted to Suzanne Raitt for her discussion of this point in a seminar at Yale in 1984.

28Rubenstein also argues that Shelley deliberately created the impression that she merely recorded Percy andByron's conversation as part of a project to make her creativity seem as passive and maternal as possible. Hediscusses at length the analogy she sets up between conceiving a child and conceiving a book, and hespecifically suggests that the men's words in conversation are like men's role in procreation, which was, in theearly nineteenth century, thought to involve the man actively and the woman only passively: "She is trying todraw for us a picture of her imagination as a passive womb, inseminated by those titans of romantic poetry"("My Accursed Origin," p. 181). I would agree with everything Rubenstein says, although I am using this ideafor a somewhat different purpose: he is using it to show how the novel is about Shelley's effort to makerestitution for her dead mother.

29 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 114.Cited by Moers and also by Rubenstein in support of his argument discussed in note 28 above.

30Harold Bloom, "Afterword," Frankenstein, p. 215. It is worth noting that Frankenstein precededPrometheus Unbound and was of course written in ignorance of the Book of Urizen.

31 Oates, "Frankenstein's Fallen Angel," p. 552.

32 Gilbert and Gubar, who focus much of their argument on Shelley's reading of Paradise Lost, connect thatreading to the demon's reading of the poem, as well as connecting Shelley's listening to her husband andByron with the demon's listening to the DeLaceys.

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